Heads of center:

Steffen Bo Jensen

+4599408313

[email protected]

The Centre for Coercion and Accountability (CECA) provides a multidisciplinary research environment concerned with understanding how coercion and accountability coexist, to gain insight into the global dynamics of coercion and demands for accountability, protection and justice.

CECA is an institutional hub for interdisciplinary research on coercion and accountability as coexisting phenomena. Coercion takes many forms and often dominate debates in the public and scholarly imaginary. Examples of coercion include confinement and incarceration, suppression of political dissent and civic spaces, political violence, state repression, and criminal governance. Debates on coercion inevitably relate to discussions of accountability, whether through legal reform, government institutions, social justice movements, or localised forms of accountability and protection against coercion.

Coercion and accountability are often researched separately or with disciplinary biases. CECA seeks to facilitate a dialogue between these fields and across disciplines. CECA’s research meets at the interface of international relations and security studies, political science/public administration, anthropology, sociology, history, and socio-legal studies, migration studies, criminology, and human rights scholarship. Methodological pluralism is central to the centre’s foundation, with researchers contributing with quantitative and qualitative analyses. CECA scholars draw on empirics from across the globe to probe the commonalities and differences in diverse empirical settings.

CECA builds on an ecosystem of different research projects that share a concern with coercion and accountability, with the ambition of serving as a hub of excellence for collaborative and cutting-edge research on coercion and accountability.

CECA is funded by the Department of Politics and Society and the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at AAU.